Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This evening, I would like to bring some highlights of a recent listening tour throughout South-West Queensland. I want to highlight the initiative that people show in Queensland and also government intrusion at both federal and state levels that is seriously hurting and in fact destroying some of the regions. I will start with Miles, where we continued the tour from the last time I spoke on this topic.

We met—'we' being me and Sharon Lohse, the One Nation candidate for Warrego, who since the redistribution has moved to the seat of Callide—on Monday morning, 20 February, with David Sweetapple, Jon Kingston, John Hoffman, Rachel Kerwick and Paula, at Paula's cafe. They are respectively a developer and salesman; a real estate person who bought Hub Real Estate there; the owner of Miles Engineering; an earthmoving, mechanical work and retail salesman and developer; and a cafe owner, as I said. They had serious complaints with what appeared to be the council not enforcing an agreement with Origin to move the camp for the coal seam gas mining contractors into town. In fact, people in town had invested heavily in building accommodation and had depended upon that agreement, and they were very concerned that it seemed that the council would not honour that agreement. I have since found that, due to some publicity, the council and Origin Energy are going to move the camp and fulfil that promise.

I raise that because two days later we visited Santos's coal seam gas production—it is not mining—near Roma, and that seems to be going extremely well, with very good relations all round. But Origin and its predecessors have really not been consistent in their application.

Also, what seems to have happened in some areas with coal seam gas extraction is that the companies have rushed to get hold of the windfall and in the process have seemingly bypassed environmental regulations and not looked after promises. It just seems that the government has enabled, in many areas, the bypassing of sound environmental regulations and has been negligent, possibly, or certainly dismissive about property rights and water, both overland water and underground water.

What this shows is that government now serves itself in Queensland at the expense of the people. This is not only the current Labor government or the previous Bligh Labor government but also the intervening Newman Liberal-National Party government. This causes massive disruption to communities and to individual lives. Government is the problem. Freedom is a society run by the people. Control is a society run by bureaucrats. This was pointed out to me by several people, as we went around southwest Queensland. Both a free society and a control-oriented society have rules, but in a free society the people make the rules.

We went to Roma that same day and met with Chris Van'tHof at the Club Hotel Roma. Here, again, we see rules going mad, suppressing people and hurting business and the community. What we see is that taxes are killing business. From memory, I will give you some examples from what Chris told us. He invested over a million dollars in setting up a nightclub in Roma. It is the only nightclub for 600 kilometres. He also invested $250,000 in security equipment, in addition to the $30,000 that was mandated, and then another $10,000, which was not required, in buying the best security and identity tracking device available. What he is able do with that, at his own initiative, is provide people—young men and women—with a very safe place for a nightclub in Roma. What happened was that the number of late night extended hours were cut from 12 to six, so the business case on which he had based his projections was completely turned upside down. I wondered why extended hours that were shortened from 3 am to 2 am would hurt? He told me that it was because the government has priced alcohol out of the reach of most people, so people preload at private residences and other places. Then they come to the pub, tanked up, at 12.30 am, and he has only an hour and a half to make his money and to pay off that one and a quarter million dollars that he has invested in the club. Also, people are deterred from drinking in the pub because of the taxes on the alcohol served in a pub.

The irony is that some of the changes were delayed by the Bligh government. They changed their regulations willy-nilly. Now there is a slowness in reverting back to the old regulations, and the Palaszczuk government is changing its mind. Also, from what we heard, mandated closing times lead to violence. When people get tanked up and leave at 2 am, they are still wanting to go out and so we actually have more violence, potentially, because they are in unsupervised places; they are in unrestricted places. Also, as the publican at the Club Hotel Roma said, the law of unintended consequences applies because they have wilder parties, underage drinking and drugs on private premises. The alcohol taxes are actually killing socialising and leading to an increase in drug use and possibly an increase in violence. The problem here is government.

That afternoon we moved to Santos's Roma field. I noticed very clearly that they had some high standards, very clean operations and a very professional approach. We were led on our tour by Rob Simpson, who is in charge of the operations for that field. He was joined by Andrew and Jeremy. We talked with and listened to Scott and Andrew, two farmers in the area. They said that their responses were very positive, and they echoed many farmers in the area. We have since heard that from other areas. Farmers and townsfolk in Roma are very pleased with Santos's operation. We heard no complaints from anyone there and had no indication of any complaints. What seems to have happened is that, after a 50-year record of conventional gas extraction, Santos moved to the Fairview operation north of Roma, which is probably one of the world's best coal seam gas extraction fields. They have done a really good job there, and then they moved back to Roma. They have gone at it slowly and learned along the way. They have maintained good relationships with the community and with the farmers. What they have done is shrunk the footprint for each gas well, which means less intrusion on the farmer. So farmers are now getting enormous benefit by drought-proofing their land. In bad years, they are still getting their revenue from the coal seam gas extraction.

I have a check list for coal seam gas extraction. Does it respect private property rights? There has been a history in our state of Queensland of state governments—both Liberal-National Party and Labor Party—pushing aside farmers property rights: stealing and destroying their property rights. In fact, the farmers at Roma said that the gas companies are respecting private property rights. They are respecting the treatment of water and handling it responsibly. They are minimising the interruption to overland water. They are putting in place dams for stock. They are managing any gas leakage. There is no gas leakage. They are managing environmental standards very, very well—no pollutants. They have a very good plan, it seems, for managing the salt, and they look after the cultural heritage. So it seems that Santos is providing a good example of effective management of a very important resource, because ultimately that has to be extracted if we want to make the most of our resources and provide cheaper energy.

Then we moved on to Charleville, where we met with Campbell McPhee, who owns and manages the Charleville Western Abattoir, the next morning. This is a very, very clean abattoir. It has very high standards, although I am not an expert. We noticed that government inspectors were there at every stage of the process—and of course the company has to pay for that. This company exports from far western Queensland to the United States, primarily—85 per cent. It has to have very high standards to do that, so compliments to the people at the abattoir. The company also exports to China and to some very expensive restaurants in Sydney. Up until the start of this abattoir, there was no small animal abattoir in Queensland. This venture now employs 165 people, many of whom are Vietnamese people. They needed people on 457 visas from Vietnam to come in because there was insufficient local skill and labour available. It was wonderful to see that the Vietnamese have integrated so well. On my previous visit, Annie Liston, the mayor of the Murweh Shire, which is based in Charleville, said that the integration has been wonderfully successful, with people working side-by-side. The abattoir earns $70 million in exports a year, treating a record 686,000 goats in one year. This is dealing with a feral goat problem but also encouraging the farming of goats in their own right. In an average year, they kill around 600,000 goats and send that to the export markets and earn export income for our country. They send it on road trains to Brisbane daily and sometimes bring sheep and in the future will be slaughtering sheep. They need to slaughter quickly, and they use government supervision.

But here is the problem, despite the success of this: there is now a move by a separate company, with Chinese owners, to reopen a kangaroo abattoir in order to treat larger animals—donkeys, camels, horses and beef cattle. There is no problem with that except that they cannot get the energy. They were promised by the energy supplier access to reliable energy, but they cannot get it, and that might now be delayed. The other problem with electricity—and this was first thing Annie Liston, Mayor of Murweh Shire, said when we met her on a previous visit to Charleville—is that electricity prices are very high and reliability and security mean electricity supply is very vulnerable. The electricity bill at the abattoir is $1.2 million for a year.

What I am trying to show with these examples is the initiative, creativity, dedication and commitment of the people of Queensland despite governments interfering. What we have to do is keep listening and acting on our constituents' requests and make it easier, because what continues to emerge is that the key challenges people of Queensland face at the moment are energy prices, regulations and taxes, and, in the case of the farmers, the return of private property rights.